WHITE WOMEN ARE THE WORST, AMIRITE? Tina Fey blasts white women who voted for President Trump. “CNN exit polls from the 2016 election show that 44% of white women with a college education voted for Donald Trump.” And a majority of white women overall, which is why white women are being savaged by the likes of Samantha Bee and Lena Dunham.
Archive for 2017
April 3, 2017
WELL, TO BE FAIR, MOST OF LEFTY POLITICS BOILS DOWN TO “SCREW YOU, DAD!” The NYT columnist Frank Bruni — in an attack on Trump — attacks manliness.
Would anyone in the NYT attack femininity — in general — the way Bruni attacks masculinity in “Manhood in the Age of Trump”? It would be outright misogyny, and Bruni deserves to be called out for the misandry here.
Much of the column is about his personal struggle as a gay man to deal with his own anxieties about whether he is masculine enough.
That’s personal to him, and not about Trump at all and not about all the other men who are free to experience, express, and enjoy whatever level or version of manliness they want.
Also, as a former food critic you’d expect him to know more about soup.
ELI LAKE: Top Obama Adviser Sought Names of Trump Associates in Intel.
The pattern of Rice’s requests was discovered in a National Security Council review of the government’s policy on “unmasking” the identities of individuals in the U.S. who are not targets of electronic eavesdropping, but whose communications are collected incidentally. Normally those names are redacted from summaries of monitored conversations and appear in reports as something like “U.S. Person One.”
The National Security Council’s senior director for intelligence, Ezra Cohen-Watnick, was conducting the review, according to two U.S. officials who spoke with Bloomberg View on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss it publicly. In February Cohen-Watnick discovered Rice’s multiple requests to unmask U.S. persons in intelligence reports that related to Trump transition activities. He brought this to the attention of the White House General Counsel’s office, who reviewed more of Rice’s requests and instructed him to end his own research into the unmasking policy.
The intelligence reports were summaries of monitored conversations — primarily between foreign officials discussing the Trump transition, but also in some cases direct contact between members of the Trump team and monitored foreign officials. One U.S. official familiar with the reports said they contained valuable political information on the Trump transition such as whom the Trump team was meeting, the views of Trump associates on foreign policy matters and plans for the incoming administration.
Those “incidental” recordings are looking less incidental all the time.
UPDATE: Sorry for the double post — looks like Glenn and I were writing this one up at the same time.
NOW BLOOMBERG’S REPORTING IT: Top Obama Adviser Sought Names of Trump Associates in Intel.
White House lawyers last month discovered that the former national security adviser Susan Rice requested the identities of U.S. persons in raw intelligence reports on dozens of occasions that connect to the Donald Trump transition and campaign, according to U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
The pattern of Rice’s requests was discovered in a National Security Council review of the government’s policy on “unmasking” the identities of individuals in the U.S. who are not targets of electronic eavesdropping, but whose communications are collected incidentally. Normally those names are redacted from summaries of monitored conversations and appear in reports as something like “U.S. Person One.” . . . Indeed, much about this is highly unusual: if not how the surveillance was collected, then certainly how and why it was disseminated.
Everyone involved should be investigated, and everyone who abused their power — which, I suspect, will be a lot of people — should be prosecuted.
THE E.U. CASTS STONES FROM ITS GLASS HOUSE:
Well, this is rich. The European Union is chastising the United States after Donald Trump’s “energy independence” executive order signed earlier this week, saying that it’s now up to the EU and China to take the lead on curbing global emissions. . . .
There’s so much wrong with this posturing that it’s hard to know where to begin refuting it. Let’s start with the fact that a study was published this week that found that only three countries in all of Europe are actually following through on the climate commitments they made in Paris 15 months ago. It’s hard, then, to imagine how Canete was able to keep a straight face when admonishing the United States for “backsliding” from its Paris commitments.
Then, too, the notion that China is ready to take the lead on climate change is in itself laughable. The country’s own ministry for environmental protection is fighting a high-profile struggle with polluters who are serving up phony emissions data. How can China hope to stick to climate commitments when the data by which we’d measure that adherence is so fundamentally unreliable?
Finally, let’s consider the fact that Trump’s executive order didn’t meaningfully change the trajectory of U.S. emissions. Before Trump signed that document, the United States was already helping to keep global emissions relatively level (by reducing our own emissions 3 percent in 2016). Those reductions came about as a result of the shale boom, and Trump isn’t about to get in the way of that.
It’s as if the whole thing is just a bunch of moral posturing, used as an excuse to raise taxes.
PRESIDENT TRUMP: If China doesn’t deal with North Korea, we will.
“China has great influence over North Korea. And China will either decide to help us with North Korea, or they won’t. And if they do that will be very good for China, and if they don’t it won’t be good for anyone,” Trump was quoted as saying, according to an edited transcript published by the newspaper.
Asked what incentive the US had to offer China, Trump replied: “Trade is the incentive. It is all about trade.”
Asked if he would consider a “grand bargain” in which China pressured Pyongyang in return for a guarantee that the US would later remove troops from the Korean peninsula, the newspaper quoted Trump as saying: “Well, if China is not going to solve North Korea, we will. That is all I am telling you.”
Beijing might like nothing better.
TAKING CREDIT: ISIS Celebrates St. Petersburg Metro Blast That Killed 10.
“We ask Allah to bless the operation by the lions of the Caliphate, we ask Allah to kill the Crusaders,” said an ISIS supporter from the terror group’s al-Minbar online forum. Others celebrated by saying that the Monday bombs made for “a metro to hell for the worshipers of the Cross” and claimed that the attacks — which are still under investigation by Russian authorities — were revenge for Russia’s backing of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, who is fighting against ISIS and other rebel groups in a six-year-long civil war. Russian airstrikes and shelling in Syria have killed hundreds of people and reduced entire areas to rubble.
If Moscow accepts ISIS as the culprits, the aftermath could prove the first real test of Russia’s renewed position in the Middle East.
EUROPE: Lithuania fears Russian propaganda is prelude to eventual invasion.
“Russia is a threat,” the defence minister, Raimundas Karoblis, said. “They are saying our capital Vilnius should not belong to Lithuania because between the first and second world wars it was occupied by Poland. It’s history of course, but Russia is using this pretext.
“Sometimes [the disinformation] is through [the government-run news agency] Sputnik, sometimes through their TV, but usually from politicians in the Duma.
“There are now reports that Klaipėda [Lithuania’s third largest city] never belonged to Lithuania; that it was the gift of Stalin after the second world war. There are real parallels with Crimea’s annexation [from Ukraine] … We are speaking of a danger to the territorial integrity of Lithuania.”
Sgt Tomas Ceponis, from the Lithuanian military’s department of strategic communication, said his team was monitoring disinformation, much of which bears similarities to the propaganda campaigns reported by Ukrainian specialists.
Lithuania fears the campaign to rewrite history could be an effort to prepare the ground for a possible attack with conventional weapons – what the military calls “kinetic operations”.
“Some of my colleagues from Ukraine told me there was a 12-year period of latent information operations, non-kinetic,” Ceponis said. “Then after, when conditions were set, they turned to kinetic operation.
“What is really a threat for us, is that we see they are working on a similar narrative for Lithuania, and they have been working on it for many years.”
Putin is certainly more brazen than the old Soviet leadership he trained under.
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UPDATE ON RUSSIAN SUBWAY ATTACK: Two nail bombs on St Petersburg metro rip through carriages, killing at least 10 as Putin visits city for meeting.
Putin came to power on a Moscow apartment bombing which he blamed on Chechens, but is widely believed to have been a false-flag operation.
NEW FRONTIERS IN LEFTIST AUTOPHAGY: Anti-Trump “March For Science” Protest Has Problems W/ Bill Nye Because He’s A White Guy. “Nye, who is not, in fact, a scientist, except on television (he’s an engineer by trade), was slated to be the March’s chair, and an announcement was made last week. But organizers quickly panicked that having Nye at the forefront of the event meant they might be substantiating the idea that scientists are only old white men.”
But hey, don’t worry: “While Nye is an old white man, he is not a scientist.”
GOOD LUCK WITH THAT: Gabby Giffords, Mark Kelly Bring New Gun Control Campaign to Arizona.
KURT SCHLICHTER: The Russiagate Scam Will Blow Up In The Democrats’ Smug Faces.
How do I know this with utter certainty? Because it’s all so glaringly obvious, and it’s the only scenario that fits the facts. As Hugh Hewitt says, this scandal has three silos. The first silo is the question of whether the Russians somehow “hacked our election.” The second silo is whether any Trump people “colluded” with the Russians. The third silo, the one patriots care most about since it’s the one that isn’t a ridiculous fantasy, is whether anyone in Obama’s administration used our intelligence apparatus to spy on his and Hillary’s political opponents. The answers are “No,” “No,” and “Yes.” The end results are going to be a stronger Trump, weaker Democrats, and various Obama minions exploring new career opportunities in the exciting fields of license plate-making, large-to-small rock transformation, and artisanal pruno distilling.
Well, stay tuned.
ATTENTION TO DETAIL: Trump makes little headway filling out Pentagon jobs.
Trump so far has only seen one Pentagon nominee — Defense Secretary James Mattis — make it through the confirmation process and has 52 additional positions to fill. Many in the defense world are bothered by the holdup.
One defense consultant told The Hill there are rumblings that the slow pace of the process is causing the Pentagon “to kind of grind.”
“It seems like at some point around March 1 it became more of a problem, the slow, tedious process in filling the posts,” the consultant said.
The sluggish pace is also not missed by lawmakers.
The top lawmakers on the House Armed Services oversight subcommittee this week sent a letter to Trump urging him to fill the existing vacancies at the DOD Office of the Inspector General and Office of Special Counsel.
“We strongly encourage you to expeditiously put forth new nominees and move them through the confirmation process so that these offices can fully exercise their statutory duty to be effective and independent watchdogs,” Reps. Vicky Hartzler (R-Mo.) and Seth Moulton (D-Mass.), the chairwoman and ranking member of the subcommittee, said in the letter.
Personnel is policy. The absence of personnel is…?
HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: NY Times: Student Loan Forgiveness Program Approval Letters May Be Invalid. “The thousands of approval letters that have been sent by the administrator, FedLoan Servicing, are not binding and can be rescinded at any time, the agency said. The filing adds to questions and concerns about the program just as the first potential beneficiaries reach the end of their 10-year commitment — and the clocks start ticking on the remainder of their debts. …”
It’s as if you can’t trust the government.
FAKE NEWS: Over Nunes issue, the media pivot from ‘substance’ to leakers.
Leaked information in the never-ending Russia drama is only of interest to the national media when it casts the slightest suspicion on the White House.
It’s unsurprising then that since Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., came out two weeks ago to say that there is at least some evidence that the Obama administration spied on President Trump during the campaign, reporters have busied themselves not with how that could be true and why but with investigating how Nunes got the dirt.
The New York Times on Thursday advanced the beside-the-point worrying by reporting that Nunes received the intelligence from two White House officials: Ezra Cohen-Watnick, the senior director for intelligence at the National Security Council, and Michael Ellis, a lawyer who works on national security.
Matthew Nussbaum of Politico followed up during that day’s White House press briefing by asking Sean Spicer if it’s “appropriate” for administration officials “to find information that then validates something the president said.”
“Information that validates” is otherwise known as: evidence that intelligence officials, under Obama, surveilled the incoming Trump administration.
The only clearly established felony here is the leaking of intelligence data to the press. The press knows who did that, but won’t say.
THAT MEANS IT’S WORKING: Obamacare Choices Could Go From One to Zero in Some Areas.
Many counties already have just one insurer offering health plans in the Obamacare marketplaces, and some of those solo insurers are showing signs that they are eyeing the exits.
Humana announced this year that they’d be leaving the markets altogether next year. That means there are parts of Tennessee that will have no insurance options unless another insurer decides to enter.
And Anthem, which operates in 14 states, is getting nervous, an industry analyst told Bloomberg News this week. Its departure would be a much bigger problem. According to an analysis of government data by Katherine Hempstead at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, Anthem is currently the only insurance carrier in nearly 300 counties, serving about a quarter of a million people.
As you can see on our map of those counties, an Anthem departure could leave coverage gaps in substantial parts of Georgia, Missouri, Kentucky, Ohio and Colorado, as well as smaller holes in other states. In places where no insurance company offers plans, there will be no way for Obamacare customers to use subsidies to buy health plans.
Without an option for affordable coverage, they would become exempt from the health law’s mandate to obtain coverage. A result could be large increases in the number of Americans without health insurance.
It’s the first self-repealing law.
VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: What Is the Alt-Left?
The Obama victory of 2008 had a profound effect on the Democratic Party, suggesting that the “power” of getting elected twice gave “truth” to Obama’s polarizing brand of organizing groups based on ethnic and racially based grievances, in concert against a supposedly fading and bigoted establishment. (This axiom is in need of some postmodern revisionism after the defeat of Hillary Clinton and the loss of most governorships, state legislatures, the Congress, the presidency and the Supreme Court.)
The Alt-Left largely dismisses the old liberal idea of 1960s Civil Rights. Liberals once promoted integration and the goal of an American melting pot empowered by the time-honored traditions of racially blind integration, assimilation, and intermarriage. The liberal goal once was a common American culture and experience where race became subsidiary. Yet we hear little from liberals any more about non-discrimination and integration. Instead, preference, diversity, and segregated safe spaces become the new discriminatory and reparatory agendas.
The Alt-Left also believes that racial, ethnic, sexual, and religious identity is essential not incidental to character—as evidenced from the profound by the recent racialist statements of would-be candidates to head the DNC, to the ridiculous, as the careerist-driven and invented identities of a Sen. Elizabeth Warren or Ward Churchill or former white/black activists such as Rachel Dolezal and Shaun King attest.
Blatant appeals to racial chauvinism such as those of La Raza (“The Race,” a phraseology popularized in Franco’s Spain in imitation of Hitler’s Volk) or “Black Lives Matter” (that went to great lengths to reject counter ecumenical arguments that “All Lives Matter”) are not just tolerated as useful political props, but institutionalized by the Alt Left to the degree that the Obama Justice Department used fines collected from financial institutions to redistribute to such Alt-Left radical identity political groups.
Another tenet is the age-old left wing idea that the noble ends of “fairness”—equality of result, and government mandated redistribution—justify almost any means in obtaining them. . . . The Alt-Left also does not really believe in free speech, at least as it was calibrated by the New Left of the 1960s that mandated “free speech” zones on campus, wrote academic handbooks outlining the need for protected expression, such as the Yale University’s highly regarded Woodward Report, or, in hippie fashion, equated free speech with advocacy for obscenity and pornography. Reading Mark Twain is hurtful and should be banned, screaming “F—k you to a Yale professor’s face is free speech and to be encouraged.
I remember describing the Critical Legal Studies movement to a judge when I was in law school. “Crap,” he said. “I thought that shit died with Marcuse.”
ANDRWEW MALCOLM: GOP infighting turns ominous for Trump and the GOP agenda.
Trump will get his Supreme Court nominee confirmed shortly, a major win. But the repeal retreat was a vivid lesson in how little control any GOP leaders maintain in 2017 over the energies and directions of the party rank-and-file. Trump benefited from that lack of cohesion last year to snatch the nomination, but now it works against him.
Within minutes of the pullback, Trump was talking up his next agenda item, tax reform. But hours later the rejected party leader resorted to Twitter to slam the 30 or so Freedom Caucus members who stood against the bill’s passage, professing allegiance to conservative principles.
Principled or petty, their stance left the Democrat ex-president’s namesake health-care measure fully in place after years of promised repeal.
“Democrats are smiling in D.C.,” Trump tweeted, “that the Freedom Caucus, with the help of Club For Growth and Heritage, have saved Planned Parenthood & Ocare!”
He added: “The Freedom Caucus will hurt the entire Republican agenda if they don’t get on the team, & fast. We must fight them, & Dems, in 2018!”
A new president, even a Republican who conveniently adopted that party, barely two months in, threatening his own party members. That makes for fighting words. And emboldened caucus members responded in kind
The smart move might be to table ObamaCare repeal for now — it’s undoing itself all on its own — and let the GOP caucus and the White House work on an issue like tax reform with a greater chance of success, and give everyone a chance to rebuild (or just build) relationships.
THE HILL: Gingrich: All ‘real evidence’ of Russian influence points to Dems.
Former Speaker Newt Gingrich said Sunday that all the “real evidence” of Russian interference in the presidential election points to Democratic collusion. His charge comes one day after President Trump tweeted that the “phony Russia story” is “a total scam!”
“It is ironic that all of the real evidence of real money and real influence-buying relates to Democrats,” Gingrich said on Fox New’s “Sunday Morning Futures with Maria Bartiromo.”
“There is no evidence that anybody was being purchased on the Republican side.”
Gingrich, a trusted Trump adviser, added that Russian interference in U.S. elections “may have helped Democrats far more than Republicans” in the past.
Gingrich cited the brother of Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta as an example, saying Tony Podesta is a “registered agent for a Russian bank” as an example.
Trump has frequently assailed allegations of possible collusion between his associates and Moscow as a smokescreen intended to compensate for Clinton’s unexpected loss in November.
Gingrich urged Congress to examine all of Russia’s efforts and involvement to subvert elections both in the U.S. and abroad, rather than narrowly focusing on possible Russian ties to President Trump’s associates.
Somebody needs to go through all the Clinton dealings with foreign interests — not just Russia — with a fine-tooth comb. Since we’re now worrying about such things.
PATRICK POOLE: Turkish Government Opened $100m Mosque in D.C. as Turkish Intel Spied From Mosques Across Europe.
On the one-year anniversary of the opening of the Diyanet Center of America, questions about its true purpose are being raised. There are ongoing investigations by European officials into widespread spying allegations implicating Turkish government-funded Diyanet mosques across the continent — just like the one opened outside of Washington, D.C. The investigations center on whether the mosques are spying on behalf of the the Turkish intelligence service, the Milli Istihbarat Teskilati (MIT).
Yesterday I reported here at PJ Media on the investigations in Germany, where authorities have conducted raids targeting Diyanet imams and high-ranking officers of the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DITIB), the official arm of the Diyanet in Germany.
Read the whole thing.
NOW HOW MUCH WOULD YOU PAY? Veg-O-Matic Maker Files to Go Public.
Act now, by buying more than $1,000 in shares, and you’ll get a one-time discount of 20% on Ronco.com purchases, the company says on its website. Pony up more than $5,000, and Ronco will kick in one of the countertop rotisserie ovens that account for more than half its revenue.
“We have millions of satisfied customers out there,” said William Moore, Ronco’s president since 2011. “We are asking them to join us with another vote of confidence in the future of Ronco Brands.”
It could turn out to be an expensive way to roast a chicken. While Ronco says it has sold more than $2 billion of housewares and gadgets since the early 1960s, it is now a small and unprofitable business. Ronco generated revenue of $9 million in 2015, according to securities filings, and just $3.6 million in the first half of 2016, when Ronco had a net loss of $2.7 million.
Ronco has an accumulated deficit of $32.2 million, according to the filings, and roughly $17 million in debt, with interest rates as high as 20%. Auditors have “raised substantial doubt” about whether Ronco can keep operating, according to the filings, which also highlighted concerns about the 22-person company’s financial reporting.
For nostalgia’s sake, it might be fun to buy a share — after the IPO fever cools down and with the expectation that it won’t be worth anything.
ED HOOPER: Iconic Medal of Honor discovered in Arkansas.
The faded faces look back at you from the past. An old photograph taken in 1890s Nebraska showing the U.S. Army’s 9th Cavalry’s K Troop or, as they were better known, buffalo soldiers. One of my journalistic quests for the last two decades has been the search for any personal effects belonging to the soldier seated third from the left. The man under that hat is Medal of Honor Recipient First Sergeant George Jordan. He also held a Certificate of Merit – the two highest commendations a U.S. soldier could receive in his era.
Jordan was born in 1847 in Williamson County, Tennessee, enlisting in the Army six months after President Andrew Johnson signed the 1866 bill allowing African-Americans to serve in the post-Civil War Army. Jordan educated himself, learning how to read and write, and joined K Troop four years later. He remained there throughout his career, proving to be one of the best field commanders in the Army west of the Mississippi. No one buffalo soldier so epitomized their motto of “We can. We will.” The white officers in charge of the all-black units often trusted Jordan with half of their commands because of knowledge and skill in the field. He served 30 years in the Army and retired.
Read the whole thing.